M emory is a peculiar thing. We are all sure we can trust it, but it often lets us down right when we need it most. The so-called witness effect, where several eyewitnesses sometimes remember the same event in vastly different ways, is only one example of memorys flightiness. Many memoirs and first-person accounts of history, whether related to the field of remote viewing or not, have often stumbled because of too much reliance on the authors memories and not enough on the memories of others or on further research.
I owe a debt of gratitude to all those who have helped my own sometimes-poor memory, and they are many. My most heartfelt thanks go to those who spent many hours in allowing me to interview them numerous times. Among these are Harold E. Puthoff, Ph.D., F. Holmes Skip Atwater, Col. William P. Johnson, U.S. Army (Ret.), Mel Riley, Gabrielle Pettingell, Jeannie Betters, Gene Lessman, but most especially (and profusely), Dale Graff and Ingo Swannappropriately so since Dale, with his nineteen-year involvement in nearly every facet of the remote-viewing program, possesses probably the greatest institutional memory (and some of the most thorough contemporaneous notes) of anyone in the field. And Ingo, not just for themany hours he spent with me, but because, in a very literal way, he was the one most responsible for making the story of remote viewing possible.
Of great additional assistance were Col. John B. Alexander, U.S. Army (Ret.), Lieut. Col. Brian Buzby U.S. Army (Ret.), Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III, U.S. Army (Ret.), Lieut. Col. Ken Bell, U.S. Army (Ret.), Maj. William G. Ray, U.S. Army (Ret.), Linda Anderson, Fernand Gauvin, Angela Dellafiora Ford, Arthur Hebard, Ph.D., Gregory Seward, Charlene Shufelt, and army psychologist Jared Schoonover, as well as the still-active operative John Koda, both of whom requested I use pseudonymns instead of their real names.
The following people aided my project greatly by answering questions, responding to my queries, granting interviews, providing me papers they wrote, and so forth. Russell Targ, Jessica Utts, Ph.D., Bob Andraka, Lyn Buchanan, Jack Houck, Dale Van Atta, Kenneth Kress, Dr. Ed May, Joe McMoneagle, Nancy McMoneagle, Dean Radin, Ph.D., Tom McNear, John Nolan, Ed Dames, Col. Bill Caniano, Dennis Roeding, former U.S. Rep. Charlie Rose (Democrat-North Carolina), Dr. Bill Schul, Stephan Schwartz, Brig. Gen. James Shufelt, U.S. Army (Ret.), and Lieut. Col. Kent Johnson, USAF (Ret.).
I appreciate Juan Salinas, Ph.D., of the psychology department, and Fred Kronz, Ph.D., of the department of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin for their advice in handling certain technical points in my book, and the late Marcello Truzzi, Ph.D., who provided insights into the skeptical side of the story and guidance with some thorny philosophical issues that arose. Mr. John Taylor, at the National Archives, who at over eighty years of age must be one of the oldest federal employees still working, also deserves recognition for the patient way he fielded all my phone calls about access to Star Gate documents.
Then there were my helperspeople who lent their time, reading, editing skills, and other abilities without which this book would be much less polished than it even is now. Most importantly, my wife and first-line editor, Daryl Gibson. Without her patience, assistance, and merciless pencil this would be a far more bloated book than it has turned out to be. Also lending important help in one or another phases of this project were: Bob Durant, Palyne Gaenir, Rich Krankoski, Shelia Massey, Fran Theis, Gene and Leveda Troy, Skye Turrell, and Cindy Waite, as well as my transcribers, Jamie Conrad, Lisa Worth, Jim Liddle, and Anne Myers.
My thanks also to Robert Knight for great conversation and his beautiful photosso few of which actually made it into the book.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Susan Gleason, to my editor at Forge, Bob Gleason, and to Bobs assistant, Eric Raab, for their enthusiasm for this project.
If I have left anyone out that deserves my thanks, I greatly apologize and assure you it was inadvertent.
No book is ever perfect, and I dont pretend for a moment to think this one is. Though I have tried to correct any I could find, there are no doubt still errors among its pages, for which I as author take sole responsibility.
A note on sources:
This book has profited greatly from the several books mentioned herein, and from the unusual access I had to three safe-drawers full of Star Gate documents that temporarily came my way during the waning months of my military career. I had to turn most of them back when I retired, but unclassified portions of themplus notes I tookhelped greatly in forming a coherent picture of the remote-viewing program as a whole. Now, with the sudden availability of 90,000 pages of Star Gate archives from the CIA, most of those documentsplus many moreare once again available to me and the public.
A few useful books for further reading:
Of books still in print as of this writing, the best place to begin is with Jim Schnabels Remote Viewers : The Secret History of Americas Psychic Spies (Dell, 1997).
The rest are in alphabetical order by author:
F. Holmes Atwater, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul (Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2001).
Joseph McMoneagle, Remote Viewing Secrets (Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2000).
Joseph McMoneagle, Mind Trek (Hampton Roads Publishing Company,1993; 1997).
Dean Radin, Ph.D., The Conscious Universe (Harper San Francisco, 1997).
Charles T. Tart and Harold E. Puthoff, Mind at Large: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposia on the Nature of Extrasensory Perception (Hampton Roads Publishing Company,1979; 2002).
Additional information plus further reading sugggestions is available at my Web site www.rviewer.com, as well as that of the International Remote Viewing Association at www.irva.org .
P aul H. Smith, a retired Army intelligence officer and Operation Desert Storm veteran, spent seven years in the Department of Defenses remote-viewing program, serving as operational remote viewer, theory instructor and trainer, security officer, and unit historian. Smith has a B.A. in Middle Eastern studies from Brigham Young University, an M.S. in Strategic Intelligence (Middle Eastern emphasis) from the Defense Intelligence College, and is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is president of Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc. (www.rviewer.com), and vice president of the nonprofit International Remote Viewing Association.
